Joe Dillard: Reasonable Fear Part 2

She pulled a wad of tissue from the box and began to wipe her face. When she was finished, she stood, straightened her back, and took a deep breath.

"Anything," she said. "Anything for my girls."

Chapter Five.

Erlene insisted on driving, so she followed me to the medical examiner's office in her red Mercedes convertible. The office was located at the Quillen College of Medicine, attached to the Veterans Administration in Johnson City, about six miles from the courthouse. Along the way, I called Sheriff Bates and told him I thought I was about to get a positive identification on the women. He said he'd meet us there. I tried to call the medical examiner to let him know we were coming, but got no answer.

Erlene and I walked in to find Hobie Stanton, the acting medical examiner, sleeping on a gurney in the examination room. Hobie was in his mid-seventies. He'd been a forensic pathologist for thirty years when he retired at the age of sixty-five, but had been asked to fill in temporarily two weeks earlier after the previous medical examiner packed his bags unexpectedly and moved to Florida. I knew Hobie was supposed to be performing the autopsies on the three dead girls, but he hadn't called me or faxed me any preliminary results, and now I wondered whether he'd even started.

I walked over and tapped him on the shoulder. His liver-spotted hands were crossed over his chest like he was lying in a coffin; his gla.s.ses were perched on the tip of his nose. He was wearing a white lab coat and what little white hair he had left was sticking straight out from his head. The tapping didn't do any good, so I leaned over him and listened. He was breathing, so I began shaking him.

Hobie's eyes suddenly flew open and he bolted straight up from the waist. He glared at me for a second, obviously confused, and then threw his legs over the side of the gurney.

"You scared me," he growled. "I nearly peed my pants."

"Don't you have a secretary?" I said. "An a.s.sistant? An intern or resident or something?"

"My predecessor took the secretary with him when he left," he said. "He failed to take his wife and child along, however. The conditions in this office must be conducive to romance."

He pushed his gla.s.ses up with an index finger. "I suppose you're here about the bodies. I've been working all night. I finished the last one about an hour ago."

"This is Erlene Barlowe," I said. "She might be able to identify them. Erlene, this is Dr. Hobie Stanton."

Hobie grunted and nodded his head. "They're in the cooler."

He led us down a short hallway into a refrigerated room with stainless steel walls. There were four gurneys sitting against the wall to our right. One of them was empty, while the other three were occupied by sheet-covered bodies with tags on their toes.

Hobie walked to the first gurney, then turned and looked at me with raised eyebrows as if to say, "Well?"

"Are you ready?" I said to Erlene.

She nodded and raised trembling fingers to her lips. Hobie lifted the sheet, revealing the face of the first girl, the one with the tattoo. Her skin was now the color of cold ashes. Erlene gasped.

"Oh no, that's her," she said, "that's Lisa." She began to cry softly as Hobie moved to the next one.

"Kerrie," Erlene whispered, her voice barely audible. A moment later, she identified the third girl as Krystal, and I put my arm around her shoulders and led her out of the room.

"Is there an office we can use for a little while?" I said to Hobie. "We're going to need some privacy."

"You can use mine," he said. "I'm going to get some coffee."

"Go in and have a seat," I said to Erlene as we walked by Hobie's office. "I need to talk to the doctor for a minute."

I followed Hobie out the front door into a hot, overcast morning. It had rained up until about an hour ago, and the steamy water evaporating from the streets rose toward the sky like an opaque curtain. Hobie pulled a pipe out of his pocket and lit it.

"What killed them?" I said.

"The one she called Lisa died of heart failure, apparently too much high-quality cocaine," he said, the pipe clenched tightly between teeth stained by nicotine. "The other two were strangled. Both of them had fractured hyoid bones and tears in the cartilage around the neck."

I noticed Bates pulling into a parking spot about twenty feet away.

"How long were they in the water?" I said.

"Not long. I'd guess an hour, maybe a little more. They went in within five or ten minutes of each other."

"I don't suppose you found anything that will help us prove who did it."

"Sorry, no calling cards. I can testify to cause of death, but that's it."

Hobie shuffled off toward the cafeteria just as Bates stepped onto the curb.

"Got your teeth in, Hobie?" Bates called.

"Go kiss a rat's patoot," Hobie hollered over his shoulder as he kept shuffling in the opposite direction.

"Hold still a minute and I'll bend over and pucker up."

Bates stood on the sidewalk, hands on his hips, grinning and watching Hobie walk away.

"I take it you know him," I said.

"Me and Hobie are kin, brother Dillard. He's my momma's cousin on her daddy's side. I see him every year at the family reunion."

I filled Bates in on the identifications and the causes of death, and he and I walked back inside to talk to Erlene. Her eyes were still red and puffy when I introduced her to Bates, but she wasn't crying.

"Are you okay?" I said as I took a seat next to her. Bates sat down in Hobie's chair on the other side of the desk.

"I want to help you find out who did this," she said. "I'll cry later."

She took a deep breath, folded her arms beneath her huge b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and began to rock back and forth in her chair.

"He called himself Mr. Smith," she said. "Every year it was the same. He'd call the week before Labor Day and tell me he wanted three blonde-headed girls for the whole night on the Sat.u.r.day before Labor Day. He paid three thousand dollars apiece for the girls. He'd come by the club the day after he called, come into my office, and pay me in cash. Always hundred dollar bills. The girls would go, they'd party, and they'd come back. Never a single problem. And now this. . ."

She dropped her head and began biting her lip, fighting back the tears again.

"What does he look like, Erlene?" I said.

"He's not very tall, shorter than both of you," she said. "Stocky. Black, curly hair and dark eyes. Probably in his early thirties. He's a rooster, I can tell you that. c.o.c.ky. Talks like he's a gangster or something. Wears his pants real low on his hips, a lot of jewelry."

"Did he talk like he was from around here?" I said.

She nodded. "He talked like a black man, but I'm guessing he's local."

"Any tattoos or scars?" Bates said.

"Not that I can recall."

"Did the girls drive out to meet him or did he pick them up?" I said.

"He always picked them up in front of the club and brought them back the next morning."

"Any idea what he was driving?"

"I saw him pick them up in a Ford Expedition a couple of years ago, but I was in my office the other night. I didn't see him."

"You said they went out on a boat," I said. "Any idea whether they went to someone's house or to a marina?"

"The girls always told me the boat was huge. One of those great big house boats that looks like a giant birthday cake when it's floating down the lake at night."

"Marina," Bates said. "People don't keep those things at their house."

"That narrows it down some," I said. "There are only three marinas on the lake."

"I remember the name of the boat," Erlene said. "It's Laura Mae. Several of the girls have told me that over the years. Laura Mae."

Bates smiled. "That'll narrow it down even more, ma'am. I doubt we're going to find many house boats named Laura Mae on the lake."

"Anything else you can remember about Mr. Smith or the boat?" I said.

"The girls always made fun of Mr. Smith. They called him gofer because all he did was run around and wait on the other two men on the boat. He was the one who got the boat ready to go, drove it, and when they'd stop, he'd bring them drinks or food or change the music, whatever they told him to do."

"So there were two men on the boat besides Mr. Smith?" Bates said. "Is it the same two men every year?"

"I don't know," Erlene said. "I didn't ask for descriptions or anything. All I know is the girls said they wore expensive jewelry and clothes and they liked to party."

I stood up and looked at Bates.

"Why don't you start looking for the boat?" I said. "I'll stay here with Erlene and have her tell me everything she knows about the girls."

Chapter Six.

It was almost noon as I wound my pickup through the curves of the narrow, two-lane road toward Ray's Marina. Bates had called my cell phone while I was talking to Erlene. He said we needed to talk to a man named Turtle. Turtle apparently ran the day-to-day operations at the marina, and Bates said if anyone knew what was happening on the lake, it would be him.

The clouds had cleared and the sun was high in the sky, beating down relentlessly, almost oppressively. The temperature had climbed to ninety degrees, the humidity was at least eighty percent, and the wind was absolutely still. I tried to focus on how Bates and I would approach the witness, but I couldn't get my mind off of Erlene and the pain that had radiated from her soul like a radio signal. The girls' names were Lisa Kay Burns, Kerri Elizabeth Runion, and Krystal Dawn Nickels.

Lisa, twenty-five, the girl with the "Hope" tattoo, had grown up in Austin, Texas, the daughter of an accountant and a nurse. Both of her parents were killed in a car accident when Lisa was fourteen years old. She was shipped off to Midland to live with an aunt, became depressed, got into drugs, and wound up stripping. She'd made the rounds through Dallas, Atlanta, Charlotte and Knoxville, and started working for Erlene a little over three years ago. She'd been a pa.s.senger on the boat each of those three years. Erlene had helped her kick her cocaine addiction ten months ago and Lisa had given up stripping, earned her G.E.D., gotten a job as a receptionist in an accountant's office, and enrolled part-time at a local community college. When Erlene told Mr. Smith that Lisa wasn't available, he said he'd double the usual offer from three thousand to six thousand. Erlene pa.s.sed the information along, and Lisa agreed to go one last time. Mr. Smith had asked for her by her stage name, "Chast.i.ty."

Kerrie, also known as "Gypsy," was a twenty-three-year-old from Columbus, Ohio. Her parents divorced when she was sixteen. After a year of bouncing back and forth between them and listening to them bicker, she decided she'd had enough. She got on a bus one day and never looked back. She'd made p.o.r.n films in New York and worked for a high-dollar escort service in Washington, D.C., before one of her colleagues told her about this little strip club in East Tennessee. Erlene described her as a "sweet little ol' thing" who loved animals and Rice Krispy treats.

Krystal, twenty-one, was from Memphis. She was a junior at East Tennessee State University, studying pre-medicine. Erlene said she came from a poor family; both of her parents were deaf and lived off of Social Security disability checks. She'd been s.e.xually abused by a neighbor when she was young and, as a result, didn't have much use for men. She'd earned an academic scholarship to college and had decided to maximize her earning potential in her spare time by taking advantage of her best a.s.set her body. Erlene told me that Krystal didn't drink, smoke or use drugs. She showed up for work on time, left when her shift was over, and stayed away from the usual hanky-panky the girls tended to get into. She'd worked hard to improve her dance skills, and because of the combination of her beauty, her act, and her aloof nature, she'd developed a large following at the club and was making more money than any of the other girls.

I was struck by the tenderness in Erlene's voice when she spoke of them. In Northeast Tennessee, which is often referred to as the buckle of the Bible belt, most people would have regarded three strippers who moonlighted occasionally as hookers the same way they would regard a crackhead or a burglar. But Erlene spoke of them as though they were her children. She was proud of Krystal, fond of Lisa, sometimes frustrated by Kerrie. It took almost two hours to get basic information from her, because she broke down and sobbed time and time again. The guilt she felt was palpable, almost visceral. It was obvious that she blamed herself for their deaths.

When I pulled into the parking lot at the marina, I saw Bates leaning against the black BMW he'd confiscated from a drug dealer a little over a year ago. His cowboy hat was perched atop his head at a slight angle and he was talking on his cell phone. I parked, got out of the truck, and looked out over the marina. There were at least a hundred and fifty water craft tied to the docks, everything from jet skis to huge house boats. A small, pale-blue building with an attached deck housed a grill and a bait shop, and there were two gasoline pumps on a dock below the deck. A short, heavy-set man wearing cut-off jeans, a wide-brimmed straw hat, and a loud Hawaiian shirt was pumping gas into a ski boat that was filled with young men that looked to be about my son's age.

I knew neither Bates nor I could board the boat if it was there. We'd have to have a search warrant for that, but there was nothing preventing us from taking a look around the outside. If we saw something that might be of evidentiary value to us, the "plain view" doctrine would apply and we'd be able to get a search warrant. I knew we might be able to get a warrant based solely on an affidavit from Erlene, but I preferred to have more evidence before I went to a judge.

"That's got to be him," Bates said as he came off the car and stuck his cell phone in his shirt pocket. "A couple of my investigators do a lot of fishing out here. They said if it happens on the lake, Turtle knows about it. Said he's a chubby guy who always wears a straw hat."

Bates and I stepped onto the dock just as the man was hanging the nozzle back on the gas pump. He turned to face us and grinned.

"Well I'll be," he said. "If it ain't the two most famous law men in the county. You're both uglier in person than you are on TV."

He offered a meaty hand, and I took it.

"Joe Dillard," I said, "and this is Leon Bates."

"Jasper T. Yates," he said. "Folks call me Turtle on account of I don't move too fast."

Turtle's face was covered with dark stubble and the bridge of his nose bent sharply to the right. He peered out from under the straw hat with bright eyes. In his jaw was a wad of chewing tobacco about the size of a golf ball.

"We're looking for a boat," Bates said.

"Which one?" Turtle said.

"It's called the Laura Mae. I believe it's one of the big house boats."

"Be happy to show her to you if she was here, but she ain't. She's gone."

"Gone?"

"As in adios, sayonara, bye-bye. Somebody took her out late yesterday evening and I ain't seen her since."

"Who took her out?"

"Some young feller. Never seen him before."

"Any idea where he went?"

"One of the fishermen told me he saw her being pulled out of the water over at the Winged Deer Park ramp."

"Does that happen often?" I said.

"It happens once a year. They take her out and store her until springtime, but they don't usually come get her until mid-September. Follow me, fellers. I need to get outta this heat and back into the air conditioning."

We started walking, very slowly, back up the dock toward the building. Turtle wasn't joking about not moving too fast. The steps he took were less than a foot long.